Mountaincow Monthly (November 2006)

HOME · MOUNTAINCOW MONTHLY NEWSLETTER (NOVEMBER 2006) Halloween is behind us and Mountaincow is ready to help you jump on the holiday bandwagon early this year. We've got fabulous holiday cards to help you send warm wishes to all your friends and family. Have a few tough ones on your gift list? We've got great personalized stationery that everyone will love. Before you stow your beautifully-wrapped gifts under the tree or beside the menorah, tuck one of our adorable gift enclosure cards under the bow so everyone will know it's from you. And don't forget the most important part of the holidays - saying thank you. We've got great thank you notes to help you make sure everyone knows how much you appreciate their thoughtful gifts. We also have great gift ideas to help you stuff those stockings.

We wish you a... As the year comes to a close, it’s time to reconnect with old friends and let them know what’s new with you and your family. Don’t want your friends to receive another boring photo strip card this year? Choose from one of our fabulous new holiday card designs to get yours sent out in a snap. Our PrintingPress design uses four drawings of a tree passing through each season on the front of an A7 White folded card. The crisp look of the card is completed by the words “Season’s Greetings” in the Benjamin Caps font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. After you’ve penned your personal greeting inside, tuck it into an A7 Clover envelope. We used a geometric green and brown background on Café au Lait stationery for our modern Platinum design. We added a black and white photo, cropped to a 1.75 inch square, floating at the center of the green square. Then we added the holiday greeting in the center of the brown rectangle in white text using a combination of the fonts Benjamin Caps and Alyssa from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. We lined the A7 Chocolate envelopes with Avocado liners to coordinate with the green background. Send along extra hugs and kisses with our Extreme 4.0 design. We added a black & white photo to the left side of the front of an A7 White folded card. We cropped the photo to a 2.688 inch square and added a red dotted line custom border around the photo. We increased the custom border’s inset to space the dots away from the photo, and added spacing between the dots so they do not touch each other. Using the Meegles font from Fonts & Graphics 3, we added “XOXO” in the same red as the dotted line border. We set the horizontal text alignment to Right and the vertical text alignment to Center to place the hugs & kisses just to the right of the photo. To make the text really pop, we applied the new Extreme 4.0 Drop Shadow text style. Fill the inside with greetings and family updates, and then slip the card into an A7 Deep Red envelope.		PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)
PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)	For the girl who has everything Simplify your shopping list this holiday season by printing some unique personalized stationery that will stand out from all the sweaters & scarves. We used PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 to create both flat and folded designs, so you can choose one or give both as a matched set. Pop a stack in a cellophane bag or tie it with a ribbon and you’re ready to go. We created bold stripes of color at the top and bottom of an A7 White flat card using Extreme 4.0’s new shape tool. We created custom patterns to fill both shapes, setting the pattern’s shape to a circle and reducing the spacing between the circles so that they are adjacent. We set the background color of the pattern to be just slightly different from the color of the circles for a subtle, modern look. The name is in a floating text box in brown Ryan font with the baseline of the text lined up with the bottom edge of the green shape. We used our printer’s borderless printing feature to print the stripes all the way to the edge of the card. For more information on borderless printing, review the Tech Tip from the November 2004 issue of Mountaincow Monthly. Print the recipient’s return address on the back flap of an A7 Chocolate envelope and it’s ready to wrap. For our folded note design, we used the same shapes in different proportions on the front of a White A2 folded note card. We printed the return address on the back flap of an A2 Chocolate envelope.
Tag... you're it! Make sure your gifts don’t get lost in the shuffle under the tree this holiday season – tag them with our adorable gift enclosure cards. A grumpy pug decked out for the holidays sits atop our PrintingPress design on a White 4-bar scored note card. With ornaments hanging from his antler headband and a red Santa sweater, he’s ready to hit the eggnog. We added a “Ho Ho Ho” holiday greeting in red using the Meegles font from Fonts & Graphics 3. We used the Inner Envelope feature to print just the gift recipient’s name on the front of a Deep Red 4-bar envelope. You’ll want to hang our Platinum design on your mantle to see if Santa leaves anything in the festive holiday stocking covered with frosty white snowflakes. To personalize the White 4-bar scored note card, and let the recipient know right away who to thank for the gift, we used a floating text box to add the family’s name to the stocking. We set the text color to off white using RGB (254, 254, 254) so that the text itself will not be transparent, but the rest of the text box will disappear when the Make White Transparent option is checked. We used the Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings and rotated the text box 28 degrees to the right to make it align perfectly with the top of the stocking. Slip the card into a Deep Red 4-bar envelope and it’s ready to go. Our PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 card stretches the holiday cheer using horizontally and vertically stretch justified text on the front of a White 4-bar scored note card. We wrote “Happy Holidays” in red and green Ryan text, and used Extreme 4.0’s new Stretch Justify and Vertical Stretch Justify tools to make the text stretch to fill the front of the card. For more information on Extreme 4.0’s new text stretching features, see this month’s Extreme Tip. We added a custom border in red and green to complete the festive look. Pair with either a Deep Red or Clover 4-bar envelope – whichever matches your wrapping paper.		PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)
PrintingPress sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Platinum sample (click to enlarge) PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 sample (click to enlarge)		Thanks a million! In the season of giving, it is important to remember to give thanks. With the flurry of holiday parties, secret Santas and family gatherings, you’re sure to have a long list of folks that deserve notes of gratitude. We have three new designs to suit anyone’s taste. Say a sweet thank you with our PrintingPress design. A row of pink and brown dots run along the bottom of a White A2 folded note card. One of the brown dots has a pink heart in its center. We added the words “Thank You” in brown beneath the dots using the Benjamin Caps font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings. Address the A2 Chocolate envelope and it’s ready to send. Go a little dotty with our Platinum design, which uses borderless printing to print a geometric pattern of a rectangle and alternating green and brown circles on the front of a White 4-bar folded note card. For more information on borderless printing, review the Tech Tip from the November 2004 issue of Mountaincow Monthly. We used a floating text box to add the words “thank you” in the brown rectangle. We set the text color to off white using RGB (254, 254, 254) and used the Beckles Wide font. Tuck the note into a 4-bar Chocolate envelope. We used PrintingPress Extreme 4.0’s custom pattern and new dotted line features to create an elegant design on a White A2 folded note card. We added a stationery border with a 4 point brown outline using the Dotted (adjacent to fill) line type. Then we added a stationery background filled with a custom pattern of blue stripes. We set the margin for the background to be slightly larger than the border’s default background size to leave a strip of white between the dotted line and the background. A floating text box adds the words “Thank You” in brown Alyssa font from Fonts & Graphics for Weddings to the center of the card. We turned off the Make White Transparent setting so that the white background of the text box blocks out the striped background. We then added a custom border to the text box using the same brown dotted line in an oval shape. We also added an inner pen in blue and a white fill to separate the dotted and solid lines. Pair it with a Chocolate A2 envelope to complete the look.
Stretch your words PrintingPress Extreme 4.0’s new text stretching tools give you even more control when designing your text. Rather than increasing spacing between letters to make your text fill the margins, the stretching tools actually change the height or width of each character. To automatically make text stretch horizontally to fill the right and left margins of your card, choose the Stretch Justify alignment in the Text toolbar. To make all your text automatically stretch vertically to fill the top and bottom margins of your card, choose the Vertical Stretch Justify alignment in the Line Spacing toolbar. In the example from this month’s Last Minute Lovely Extreme project, we used both Stretch Justify and Vertical Stretch Justify. To make letters’ ascenders and descenders line up perfectly, we then used the Stretch Horizontally and Compress Horizontally buttons in the Line Spacing toolbar. We tweaked the width of a few of the letters so that the descenders of the “p” letters do not overlap the “i” or “d” in “Holidays.” Mountaincow has great gift ideas for every budget. To make your holiday shopping even easier, we’re offering free shipping on orders over $100. Just enter the coupon code HOLIDAY2006 during checkout.*
Easy Scrapbooking Paperback Mountaincow's beautiful new softcover book bridges the gap between traditional and digital pages by showing stylish layouts created using a home computer in combination with traditional scrapbooking techniques. With an introduction by Leslie Ayers of Scrapbook Answers magazine and a bonus CD with how-to videos, fonts, graphics, patterns and layout templates, you can easily create beautiful, stylish pages of your own.

Easy Invitations Hardcover Mountaincow's beautiful hardcover book presents stylish projects created using a home computer that are easy for beginners to achieve, yet sophisticated enough for professional designers. Includes paper and typeface selection advice, party planning tips and anecdotes and an extensive Tools & Techniques chapter to ensure you are ready to design and print your own professional-looking invitations in no time. Also includes Bonus CD with fonts and graphics used in the projects shown in the book.

Personalized Stationery Have you upgraded to PrintingPress Extreme 4.0 yet? If so, you can make everyone on your list personalized stationery. Use our To the Extreme project from this issue, a sample from past issues, or design your own. Print their return address on the envelopes, and you've created a one-of-a-kind gift!

PrintingPress Extreme 4.0, Personal Edition Mountaincow’s next-generation software for home invitation printing includes powerful features such as dotted line borders, stretched text, shape objects, patterned text, text on a curve, diamond and circle monograms, multi-style text boxes, labels, business cards, print to graphics file offset printing and much more! Includes hundreds of patterns and more than 100 sample projects.

Mountaincow Gift Certificate The ideal gift: a gift certificate redeemable for any product on the Mountaincow online store. We will email a gift certificate with a personalized message. Please review gift certificate terms and conditions before purchasing.
*Offer valid on orders placed on www.mountaincow.com by December 31, 2006, at 11:59 p.m., ET. No price adjustments on previous purchases. Offer is not transferable. Cannot be combined with any other offers. Offer not valid on purchases of gift certificates. Offer valid in the continental U.S. and Canada only.